


Seeing Strange

by inactive_pseud_sorry



Category: Gorillaz
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-23
Updated: 2014-10-23
Packaged: 2018-02-22 06:56:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2498762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inactive_pseud_sorry/pseuds/inactive_pseud_sorry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>2D can't braid hair for his life, but maybe that's okay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seeing Strange

**Author's Note:**

> A commission for [allofwhichmakesmeanxious](http://allofwhichmakesmeanxious.tumblr.com)! Hope you like it. I'm pretty new to the Gorillaz fandom, so my apologies for any factual errors.

When the blue-haired boy stares into the sky, past the tip of a small finger pointing to the stars, he feels like maybe it’s home. Not here, not now, just the concept of it--wide, open, real. 

He was sitting on the roof when she joined him. Of course, he had gone there to be alone like he had done so many times before. The ceiling isn’t strong or well-built in any way, making it dangerous. Maybe that’s why he does it--if the roof crumbles underneath him, it’ll be a relief. So that’s what he’s contemplating when the small girl shimmies up the drainage pipe and hops onto the roof; the possibility of his own demise from falling through badly-secured roof tiles. 

But then she’s sitting next to him, legs crossed and eyes widened at the sky, and his breath is catching in his chest as he says her name, “Noodle…?” She doesn’t turn, just looks across the cityscape like it holds some sort of answer to life. _Maybe it does_ , he thinks, _maybe I’m missing it_. 

Sighing out of his nose when she doesn’t answer, he leans back with his hands behind his head against the slope of the roof. Lips curling into an ‘o’ shape, he whistles a nameless tune he’s had in his head for a few hours. Not really song material, just…. something. It’s kind of nice to think of a piece of music that way--no obligations, no need to make it into something more than a melody. 

A small head plops onto his stomach and he looks down to see Noodle lying down on his torso, eyes still to the starry sky. Smiling a little, he let’s out a long exhale and looks at the sky, himself, continuing to whistle. Before long, her arm is sticking up in the air as she mumbles something he can’t quite discern in Japanese, finger tracing a constellation that doesn’t exist. But it _does_ exist; he sees it and knows she’s not crazy. It looks like a music note, maybe, a really wonky music note.

She elbows him, hard, in the leg, making him yelp. “I see it, I see it. Kinda reminds me of you, haha,” he laughs into the empty space in the sky, but she doesn’t respond. She just brings her hand down and nods, closing her eyes and tapping one foot on the roof tiles to some unknown beat. 

2D thinks he’s happy, then. Like, not entirely, not that’s ever really one-hundred-percent happy, but it’s something. It’s enough. Reaching his hands down, he wraps a few loose braids into the young girl’s dark hair which are probably more of knots than anything else but she doesn’t seem to care. Instead, she just grins and bites her lip, trying not to laugh as he cusses under his breath. He’s making a mess of things, really and truly, but she just laughs on. They fall asleep up there that night, Noodles head still resting on the older boy’s stomach.

 

“You really _can’t_ braid hair, can you?” She’s leaning into the balcony, arms crossed over her chest and a smug grin plastered over her pimply teenage complexion. This time, he’s trying to braid a doll’s hair.

Groaning, he rolls his eyes and crosses his legs on the floor. “It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to scare the douchebag. ‘Isn’t professional styling, here.”

“Whatever.” She turns around and leans over the balcony, feet dangling a few inches above the ground as she holds herself up on the railing. The sound of cars whizzing by can be heard below, but he just shakes his head and looks down at the Barbie monstrosity. It’s a disaster, really: Face painted blue with red eyes and black dimbles; outfit torn into pieces; hair in in a tangled mess. It’s exactly as it should be and it should do the trick to freak out Murdoc if he hangs it directly over his bed, but… 

“Teach me, then? If you’re so insistent…” He mutters, holding up the doll. The fourteen year old flips around with a grin and eyes lit up all the way but then grimaces at the children’s toy in his hand.

“Um,” she leans back into the railing and points lazily at the horrific masterpiece. “There’s no way I’ll be able to untangle that. Gotta use real hair.” Before he can speak, her eyes open wide. “I’ll use _yours_!”

Tossing the doll onto the bed, he scrambles to his feet and leans back a few steps, into the back wall of the room. “No way. You’ll just wreck it.”

Noodle looks offended, curling her mouth into a sneer that, because of her age and lack of makeup, just looks childish. “No faith. You have no faith. What-ever. I can show someone else my killer braiding skills.”

Of course, it only takes him a few seconds to be out on the roof, legs criss-crossed on the pavement and a roll in his eyes that’s less than sincere. She grins, clicks her teeth and plops down behind him, fingers finding their way into the not-so-tidy tangles of the older man’s hair. Feeling her tiny fingertips weaving through the strands, he looks out to the city and, eventually, closes his eyes. It feels too silent, maybe, when he can hear her breathing as well as his own.

Luckily, she speaks before he has to, poking him in the back of the head. “Toochi, your hair’s too short. I can barely get two rows of braids.”

Shrugging, he smiles a little bit at the edge of his mouth and then stares down into the creases on his palms. Parallel folds of skin make him feel on edge, like they shouldn’t be there; alien parts of his body. Still, he leans back with his head resting on the teenager’s shoulder. “Sorry. I’ll have to grow it out, huh? So you can braid it right.”

“You better,” she mumbles, ruffling the blue strands of keratin between thin fingers and shoving away. 

Without someone behind him, 2D finds himself rocking backwards, head tilting into the concrete. “Ow, shit,” he mumbles in-between clenched teeth, watching Noodle’s upside-down feet tap away to the corner of the balcony. There, she leans into the material and closes her eyes, hair waving in the wind.

The blue-haired boy thinks maybe the strangest thing about her, weirdly enough, is her hair. Even more so than her shaky past, odd habits and guitar skills beyond what anyone would have imagined of a ten (now fourteen) year old girl, her hair is perplexing. In some lights it’s ebony, it’s darkness, the night on which there are no stars. From others, late evening. Dusk. From still others, dying violets in a field. If he looked even closer into the deep shade, 2D thinks that he might even find himself. Not a color that reminds him of himself, the real him locked away for years within a pre-pubescent girl’s hair.

Shaking his head, he sits up and slumps, eventually dragging himself over to the open sliding door. Inside, the doll is still discarded on the bed. After holding it up by the misshapen atrocity of hair, he grimaces and shoves it underneath the bed. _Probably not worth it, anyway_. With one last glance out the door, he frowns. She’s still out there, facing the city like always, seeing something he can’t. She’s growing up and he can see it clear as day, clear as a high resolution photograph, clear as a chlorine-filled pool.

Maybe all common knowledge like this seems strange to him, but probably not.

 

He wakes up in a sweat in the middle of the night, clutching his blankets for dear life even when overheated. But it’s not just the sweat, it’s the fear and he’s _drowning_ in it. Past drowning, really, but that’s not a clarification anybody cares about except him. So he drags himself out of bed, of course, and stares into a dirtied mirror that just shows him the same thing he doesn’t want to see. After that: get dressed, brush your teeth, take a shower, maybe. Eat. Normal things normal people do in their normal lives after normal dreams.

And in a way, this dream _is_ normal--too normal. The same damn dream almost every night, the same damn image in his head like fingerprints on a glass vase that you can never _quite_ get rid of.

Sometimes it’s totally clear, sometimes it’s not. What stays the same are the flames. The flames are always there, scorching and warm even when he knows he’s asleep. And the sensation of falling, falling forever, falling into pits of depression so deep he can’t claw himself out because as he’s falling he sees her and he’s always just a few inches away from grabbing her hand and catching her.

With the thumb of his left hand he rubs the skin on the palm of his right and blinks his eyes a little longer than necessary before dumping some pills into his hand and then into his mouth. They burn a little going down dry, but it’s nothing new. He kinds of likes it, really; it makes him feel real. Because without pain, how _do_ you exist? Without feeling, how do you know your right hand from your left or your eye from your heart? 

_Without the wind to make dead violets look ebony_ , he thinks, running one hand through his hair slowly, yawning, _how do you know whether you’re actually aging at all?_

Later, on a submarine, he’ll ask a face with hair too dark for the lighting if she knows how to braid hair. “No, you idiot,” a nasally voice from up front will bark as she turns away, sneering, “Course not.”

 

Reaching out gingerly, he brushes two fingers against the skin and then recoils away. It’s purple and black, scarred like ink blots on torn paper. “It… it hurts a lot?”

Shrugging away, she tosses her hair over the markings again. “Dunno, not really. It’s numb, mostly.” He frowns and reaches out again, but she stands up and rubs her face before giving him a pointed look. “Don’t touch it.”

“I was just trying to-” He tries to start, but she stops at the door, fingers resting on the brass handle. 

The guitarist interrupts. “I know.”

He doesn’t speak, letting her leave in slumping silence down the hall. She’s tired, she’s worn-out and she’s _different_. Still…. all the time, her hair… it’s the same. The same change, the same complexity. It’s familiar and nice, really nice. Even if she doesn’t talk as much, even if there’s something off about her.

But that’s the way it is. For weeks, months. A long while. It’s only natural, then, that they grow back together. It’s slow and strange but it happens and before long he finds himself on the rooftop with her just a few feet away, their bodies aligned somewhere between the sky and Russell’s stomach. He’s sleeping, now, and doesn’t really mind anyway. Besides, there’s no easy place other than this to go. 

Inside, beats are shaking the apartment like tiny riots as Murdoc entertains some guest or the other. Letting heavy lids slide to slits over black orbs, the blue-haired man blinks lazily at the evening sky. No stars out just yet, only clouds, dark and brooding. It might rain.

And then she’s scooting over to him again, saying, “Your hair’s gotten longer,” and he’s saying, “I don’t think so,” and she’s saying, “Yes it has, get it cut.” But he doesn’t answer that, just staying put as she runs long fingers through the azure strands. Her fingers, long and slim, aren’t those of a child’s anymore. Nothing about her is childish, really, except her personality. And even that’s matured, leaving her a shell of a girl missing years out of her childhood. Or so he thinks.

“Still not long enough to braid?” He mumbles, twiddling his thumbs together over his stomach. 

Laughing, a little, her fingers stop moving, palm resting on his head. “No…” She stops, suddenly, removing her hand. Furrowing his eyebrows, he sits up and turns around. The woman’s eyes are downcast, hair tossed in the breeze. Her scars look even more faded in this lighting, he thinks. _But they’re not._

“Noodz-” He starts, but she just looks up and bites her lip before grabbing his wrists and gripping them tightly.

“I don’t know, I just- I don’t know. I think…. it’s long enough, right? Like, after this long your hair should be long enough that it’s okay?” She babbles it all out in one long string, leaving no room for breath or pause because neither are necessary.

Tilting his head slightly to the right, 2D feels a confused expression melt across his complexion. “...What?”

Looking over at the still-sleeping Russell, she nervously rolls her eyes. She’s not confident, he can tell. Not right now. “You’re an idiot.” 

Sliding thin, too-rough hands up his arms and leaving trails of shiver-scars over the skin, she leans in and then they’re kissing, they’re _kissing_ , they’re _oh my god_ and then he jolts away. But his hands are still somehow on her thighs and he’s remembering the first time he saw her again and thinking, _this isn’t the little girl from back then, she’s different, she’s not…. anymore…._

“You’re not a kid, now,” he whispers under his breath, letting his gaze flick up to her hurt eyes and then back down to to the whitened knuckles of his own hands on her legs. “ _Shit._ ”

“...Pardon?” She shudders out, twitching her arm as she runs the other hand over it. When there’s no answer, she shifts to move away, exhaling quickly. But then he’s seeing the flash of dead violets as the shadows over the hill hit her hair; he’s thinking the answer is “yes,” even if he doesn’t have a question to put it with.

Reaching out one hand, he grabs her arm and tugs her back down to Russell’s stomach. “Wait, I…” He flicks his eyes to the left; the drummer is still snoozing soundly. Murdoc is downstairs, of course, and not likely to come up. A questioning expression on the woman’s face, she slowly runs her upper teeth over her bottom lip.

Looking down again and then back up, he shakes his head. His head goes down again, then up, then down, making him look like a bobblehead. Hands trembling, he places them on her thighs again and looked up, almost wincing. _Stupid, stupid, you’re stupid_. Leans forward. _Stupid, holy shit, stupid_. Kisses her on the lips, leans in further, brings one hand to the back of her perfect, _god_ , perfect thin neck. _Stupid as hell._

But it’s also right, he knows, totally right. Totally. Her teeth lightly nipping his bottom lip, he thinks he gets what she was trying to say earlier about hair. Or something.

“Stupid idiot,” she mumbles, shuddering into the skin like a middle-schooler holding hands with someone for the first time.

Softly, breathily, a little shakily himself, he knocks noses with the other girl, no, woman. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Yeah.” 

And when she looks over the horizon later, hand clutching his for dear life, he thinks he actually sees what she sees for once.


End file.
